The New York Times Book Review once commented that "Invisible City" is like a memory, while "Kyle Waldo" conveys a perceptual and tangible quality of life.
City life may be full of small troubles and helplessness, but there are also many small joys and sorrows. Season after season, year after year, Calvino's four seasons are the key words. With the day-to-day city life as the background and the wonderful and interesting imagination as the carrier, a family of six is crowded in a small and cold basement every day, and only dare to pick up the goods and put them back in the supermarket.
This Kyle Waldo is like the last sentence written by Calvino in Invisible City: "Look for people and things that are not in hell, learn to distinguish them, let them exist, and give them space."
The structure of Kyle Waldo is very novel, and the book is divided into 20 independent short stories. These 20 stories are unfolded according to the cycle of five years and four seasons. Each story tells the story of a daily life of Kyle Waldo, a laborer at the bottom from the countryside to the city. Although these daily fragments are independent of each other, they are combined to connect the life stage changes of an ordinary person, and at the same time, these fragments contain the fate of people, animals and plants and the temperament of the city. The cycle of four seasons and five years is enough to glimpse the life of Kyle Waldo and make people feel the existence and struggle of everything.
In this work, Calvino shows the interactive state of human nature, society and existence (represented by people, cities and animals and plants respectively). Every element can be a variable. This variable is like a butterfly flapping its wings in the tropical rain forest of Amazon River basin in South America. Although seemingly insignificant, it can have an impact that can change all fate.
Marvaldo's self-exploration;
The leading role of Kyle Waldo is undoubtedly the leading role of Kyle Waldo. Under the shaping of Calvino, Kyle Waldo seems to be an ordinary urban bottom worker. He took his wife and children everywhere to make a living and compromised the rules of the system in order to fill his stomach. His life is basically the same as others. But under the surface, Kyle Waldo's behavior and thinking are always opposed to the daily life under the popular values. Sometimes it is Kyle Waldo's victory, and sometimes it is the universal values that crush individuals.
In the shadow of social environment, individuals with nowhere to hide have only two choices. They either conform to the society and become ants moving bricks, or stick to themselves and live in resistance forever, making their lives unique because of ups and downs. Calvino asked Kyle Waldo to choose the latter, which also showed Calvino's infinite support and bias for personal exploration of life. He encouraged people to find a personal position, hoping that people's fate could be more in their own hands, rather than being passively influenced by the environment. Waldo and Kyle have been picking poisonous mushrooms for five years, catching poisonous rabbits in the laboratory, making money with bee acupuncture therapy, and finally grabbing a fish with a cat. Every spring, when everything is revived, he wants to do something for a change. Animals and plants became his tools against society and fate.
Calm of Animals and Plants: Why is this work as amazing as Pearl in the Sea? Because even animals and plants as tools, the author gave them the initiative to survive and fight. In this novel named after characters, the author used a lot of pen and ink to describe animals and plants. Through the living conditions of animals and plants, it reflects the embarrassment of characters or promotes the development process of characters and environment.
At first, Kyle Waldo regarded him as a poisonous mushroom, and later he was more willing to share it because of jealousy. Towards the end, he flew with him in the city and finally lost all the green plants with yellow leaves. Just like the rebellious society in Waldo Kyle, these plants raised by the sun and running water are also rebelling against the characters. They use their aggressive or self-destructive characteristics to hurt the character's body and mind again and again. Judging from the plants that represent survival, the survival of plants seems to have nothing to do with the influence of people and society, but whether they can survive all the time has always been determined by people and the environment. In this short story, Calvino joined many animals, including the laboratory poison rabbit taken away by Kyle Waldo, the cows passing by the city and the cats in the small garden. These animals either accept their fate with an open mind or have a natural attitude towards life. Without exception, they all have a home. Compared with Nowhere to Hide by Kyle Waldo, the composure of animals shows their self-identity and unconditional acceptance of life.
Panic and hunger in cities;
People, animals and plants all have life, which can fully reflect the theme of self-exploration that Calvino should highlight; So how can a lifeless city complete its mission of revealing reality under the author's pen? The appearance of the city is not always what Calvino wrote, but is often hidden in the eyes of the protagonist Kyle Waldo. "At a corner, you can see the whole city below it, scattered on a big gray net woven by roads." "He felt that it was like a leaden wasteland, stagnant and dirty, covered by rows of roofs and wisps of smoke wrapped around branches and chimneys." These are just one or two aspects of countless cities in Kyle Waldo's eyes.
Although the city, as a symbol of the social environment, always oppresses Waldo and Kyle, in the eyes of the characters, the city is already in jeopardy, swaying on the gray net woven by roads, messy because of rows of roofs, entangled by smoke, and becoming like a lifeless wasteland. In Kyle Waldo's eyes, I only feel hunger and panic in the city. Finally, Calvino puts the real environment almost under the cognition of personal consciousness, which once again shows his admiration for the freedom consciousness of characters and the subjective initiative of personal exploration.
The pursuit and adjustment of individual will;
1, the importance of personal consciousness is reflected in the integrity of Kelvaldo, and Calvino puts personal exploration in a higher position. But in today's society, can the individual's will still be higher than the influence of the real environment? I have a negative attitude. Judging from the background of this work, Kyle Waldo was created by Calvino in the early 1950s. At that time, the economy of western Europe was developing rapidly. With the development of industry and the rise of economy, the whole society is in a chaotic but upward state. The disordered but good reality makes Calvino doubt and disappoint the reality and politics. Under the guidance of this negative emotion, it is a matter of course that the personal consciousness before being pushed is more valuable and better.
2. There is a * * between individuals, society and environment. However, after a long period of development, the social reality of steady economic growth has existed for many years under a mature and constantly improving framework and system. These frames and systems are like bottles carrying cities, and it is difficult for all people, animals, plants and cities to escape or make breakthroughs. Therefore, in this case, the character's will can actually pursue survival itself, find a good home with a normal heart, and then grow sturdily like a cat in a small garden, and finally successfully repel the aggression of bulldozers and excavators in the same way. When individuals have a clear self-orientation and explore a suitable way of existence, they will not turn all their efforts into aimless tossing like headless flies; Limited and flexible use of reality and environment is limited by the framework of rules and systems, and there will be no sense of oppression.
The human soul is always free. Some people see the city in the bottle, some people see wildlife, and some people see themselves. Calvino expressed his free will with a fairy tale of an adult. In adult fairy tales, there are many gestures for everything. We should find what we can see and love to see, and experience life from beauty and joy.